“We refuse to be intimidated”: The resistance practices of Black elder teachers who taught during school integration

• In Event: Journeying From Home to Everywhere: Centering Black Girls and Women Across Learning Environments

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes:
Black teachers today experience antiblackness daily within their school districts. They often work in segregated schools, witness the disproportionate disciplining of Black students, teach curricula that predominantly focus on white males, and encounter racially motivated pushouts from their districts. Given the unique challenges that Black teachers face, it is essential for them to learn resistance strategies, which Black women educators have used throughout time. This study draws from the oral histories of 12 Black women teachers who taught during school integration during the 1960s and 70s in the Bay Area. I ask, what can we learn from elder Black women teachers in search for Black-affirming, liberatory education?

Perspectives or theoretical framework:
I draw on Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) as the theoretical grounding for this research. BlackCrit, born out of Critical Race Theory (CRT), centers Black counterstories to resist the pervasiveness of racism in the United States (Dumas and ross, 2016; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). As whiteness and humanness became synonymous, BlackCrit demonstrates how Blackness is antagonistic to whiteness, as it threatens to topple the structure that is predicated on Black lives as not mattering. BlackCrit allows me to see how antiblackness impacted the teachers’ decision-making and responses to the hardships they faced.

Methods and Data Sources:
I sat in the living rooms of 12 Black women teachers who taught during school integration, audio and video recording each 90-minute oral history. Building from humanizing research practices, I also had the teachers share teaching artifacts to illustrate their resistance practices. These artifacts included newspaper articles, class pictures, pay stubs, and lesson plans. After transcribing the interviews and analyzing the artifacts, I commenced thematic analysis by examining how particular resistance practices functioned to sustain Black women within the teaching profession.

Findings:
I found that Black women teachers resisted antiblackness in three main ways. First, they engaged in political activism outside of their teaching. Mrs. Williams described how after church let out on Sundays, she would march down the street in heels to protest at the Board of Education. Second, they were at the forefront of innovative and inclusive pedagogies, teaching topics that were rendered taboo, like the AIDS epidemic, the Japanese Internment Camps, and the racialized and violent nature of police interactions. Finally, they worked toward leadership roles so that they could be a the forefront of change by becoming principals and superintendents.


Scholarly significance of the study:
As conservative states across the United States dismantle DEI programs, attack CRT, and erase the teaching of history, it is becoming increasingly necessary to understand how Black teachers can resist these anti-Black measures. To work toward the remedy and repair it will take to address the antiblackness they face, I argue that we can turn to Black women teachers who taught during one of the most politically and racially tumultuous times as a blueprint for how present day educators can foster liberated learning and address Black harm in schools.

Author

• Jessica Lee Stovall, University of Wisconsin - Madison